It never got the recognition accorded to The Royle Family or The Office but Early Doors was every bit the equal of those two benchmark comedies. Written by Phil Mealey and Craig Cash (Cash also co-wrote The Royle Family), the bittersweet tale of a pub landlord and his ragged regulars mixed laughter and tears into an addictively warm-hearted brew.

Independent Review

He's not afraid of sentiment, Craig Cash. Indeed, he's not even nervous about painfully cute, judging from the opening of Sunshine, BBC1's new comedy-drama.

This is the latest series from Craig Cash and Phil Mealey, who wrote BBC2's quietly brilliant Early Doors. Cash also co-wrote (and played Dave in) The Royle Family, so there's pedigree here. You'd expect wry Mancunian wit and warm character comedy - and that's exactly what you get.

The story centres on Steve Coogan as Bing, a lovable but hopeless chancer given to joking his way out of trouble. He leads not so much a hand-to-mouth existence as hand-to-bookies, and so spends much of the time in the doghouse with girlfriend Bernadette (beautifully played by Lisa Millett). There's quality support from Bernard Hill as Bing's dad, whose idea of babysitting is to wake his grandson up for an evening of tall stories about how he gave Hitler a Chinese burn. And Cash and Mealey turn up as bin-men. It's gently amusing, with a loving attention to detail, but don't expect belly laughs - it's classed as a comedy drama.

Sunshine is wonderful stuff. This particular type of sunshine, written by Craig Cash and Phil Mealey (the team behind Early Doors and The Royle Family: Queen of Sheba), tells the story of three generations of a family from the 1970s. Steve Coogan plays a likeable young man who married his childhood sweetheart; he is funny, cheerful and optimistic, someone capable - according to Grandad (Bernard Hill) - of charming the nuts off a squirrel. Sadly he is also a compulsive gambler who squanders what little money the family has and risks losing everything that matters to him. Sunshine doesn't have the fly-on-the-wall naturalism of The Royle Family, but it does share its warmth and its humanity.

Steve Coogan takes the lead in a gentle but affecting comedy-drama about addiction. Scripted expertly by Craig Cash and Phil Mealey, it's the story of Bob 'Bing' Crosby, a man who loves a flutter.

As you'd expect from Cash, the setting is resolutely northern and ordinary, and the focus is on Bing's family - the young son who narrates the action, the long-suffering childhood sweetheart, the dad with a part to play in how Bing turned out.

Compared with the usual stuff of prime-time slots, Sunshine requires emotional investmnet. In the course of three episodes, this should be richly rewarded.

Craig Cash and Phil Mealey script this bittersweet comedy drama about 'Bing' Crosby, a lovable loser with a destructive streak of gambling addiction that keeps him never too far away from the bookie's counter. It has that essential northern grit to it that you'd expect from the writers of Early Doors and The Royle Family, and Steve Coogan is great as Bing, giving the character a more paired down reality than grotesques like Alan Partridge and Tommy Saxondale. Cash and Mealey pop in as comedy bin men, but the real honours here go to the exceptional Bernard Hill as Bing's dad. A highly promising start.

Craig Cash Interview

It's a beautifully observed drama with a number of dark moments.

Early Doors is a step brother of The Royle Family, having the same father, Craig Cash, but not the same mother, Caroline Aherne. It is such a slow-burning comedy that you only start to smile during the next programme. Which happens to be Newsnight. This is a bonus as it sweetens the news and, indeed, Kirsty Wark whom, on any normal night, you would watch from behind the sofa.

BBC call to end ratings obsession

Programmes that score low in the ratings often do well in the Barb audience appreciation indices (AIs). Early Doors, a comedy by Craig Cash averaged only 1.7 million viewers in its first outing, but scored particularly highly on the AIs. Ms Root decided to commission a second series, partly because such a high proportion of viewers enjoyed it.

The new sitcom Early Doors is a sort of kid of The Royle Family, but now being raised by the father alone. The series was being written by that show's co-creators, Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne, until, we may guess, she decided that a show set in a pub was not the perfect subject for her at the moment. She left and Cash co-opted a new dialogue buddy, Phil Mealey.

Cash has said that the plan had been for Aherne to play a landlady but that they had difficulty imagining the character. But Cash's admission raises the project's main problem, which is that pubs are as familiar a part of television as televisions are of pubs.

In fact, one of the reasons that The Royle Family was so daring was that experience of the medium led you to expect that they must eventually get off their arses and go to the pub, but they never did. Early Doors aims for the same claustrophobia by trapping the characters on one set, but people stuck on alehouse benches don't have the same visual shock as a whole family beached on a settee.

Shot in dirty light without a laughter-track, the show begins with landlord Ken (John Henshaw) in his empty empire, decanting cheap brandy into a posher bottle and diverting the charity box into the till.

The regulars arrive and exchange banalities ("temporary traffic lights over at Samuel Street"), inanities ("Joe's having a shit"), incomprehensible in-jokes and semi-derelict slang ("Keep your hand on your halfpenny"). Future plot possibilities are laid down: Ken's daughter isn't actually his and there's also doubt about the father of her own child. Many scenes take place in the gents, the soundtrack featuring the meticulous drip of piss and plop of shit.

In the modern style - The Office, Phoenix Nights - it's the kind of comedy that should come with a bottle of paracetamol or a length of rubber tubing for the car. The theme could be described as the loneliness of company. It's potentially brilliant, but the pisser is that viewers have spent so much time in pubs. Though in Aherne's absence they've sensibly dispensed with a landlady, Ken keeps tripping over Al Murray's pub landlord.